what are google adsense impressions…page impressions and ad unit impressions

Posted on June 10, 2012August 2, 2016bybarkeep

No matter what the values are for your other statistics like CTR and CPC, the Adsense impressions count is one of the major factors affecting your revenue. Often the first and the easiest thing that you have to increase upon is the impressions. In order to increase the Adsense impressions you get, you need to understand the concept, definitions and the working of impressions.

What is an Impression?

An impression is a single instance when a web page is fully loaded and displayed on the user’s web browser. This concept can be extended to each individual element on the webpages to refer to the impression of that particular element. These elements could be advertisements, images, links or any part of the web page.

In the context of Google Adsense, there are two types of impressions that you need to know about : Page Impressions and Ad Unit Impressions.

Page Impressions

An Adsense Page Impression is the number of times a web page that contains at least one Adsense Ad unit is loaded and displayed on the user’s web browser. The page load is detected by the inserted Adsense code, which is different from the web analytics code.

This page impression is different from the analytics page impression and you will see a varied difference between the two counts. There are several reasons as to why the page impressions from Adsense and web analytics could be different.

The user could have blocked the analytics code on their web browser or it could have failed to load.

The user could have blocked the Adsense code or it could have failed to load.

The webpage may not have any ad unit or Adsense code, but do have the analytics code.

Your Adsense Ad unit may not have matched any ads and hence displayed PSAs (Public Service Advertisements).

Ad Unit Impressions

The Ad unit impression is defined as the number of times the ad units are loaded and displayed in the web browser across all Page impressions. There is a proportional co-relation between Unit impressions and Page Impressions in that the more page impressions you have, the more likely that you are to have a high Unit impression. If you have three ad units in every page, then the unit impression is roughly three times the page impressions.

But it is possible that you will have less than that due to a couple of reasons

The user may have browsed away or closed the browser before all the ad units loaded.

You may not have the same number of ads on all the pages.

One or more ad unit may not have loaded due to lack of advertisers.

The Ad units can contain a varying number of individual ads in each of them depending on the size and type of the ad unit. So, the actual number of ads that are displayed is different and usually more that the Ad unit impression.